Join us this weekend at the Visible Evidence conference! We’ll be speaking on August 13, at the day-long workshop at Hunter College : The City and the Expanded Documentary.

It will be a great day, and we’re looking forward to our panel, “The Urban Documentary, New Forms for New Cities” in which we’ll be talking about the new ways that our recent project, The Triangle Fire Open Archive, explores new ways to know the city and its history – through unconventional archives, visual urbanist approaches, and creative forms of participation. In particular, we’ll be talking about some of the newest objects and stories about the 1982 Chinatown garment workers strike (one of these, above) – and the way gathering these objects in the context of the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire tells a complex story about the city.

The urban documentary has taken new life formally and socially as concepts move away from origins in ‘single channel’ form to a broad variety of new lives in locative media contexts, including GPS triggered audio and video, web-based media from issue-based blogs, to games, to social mapping. Sometimes these are projects initiated by filmmakers, at other times, they are framed by architects, urban planners and organizers. What do these new practices look like? What is their justification? What happens to documentary notions on these new platforms where the boundaries between subject, maker and location shift? This workshop is designed as an introduction to some of these practices in a form useful both to makers and theorists.